![]() ![]() ![]() In 2016, the indictment states, the manager of the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow gave that executive a tour of the the hotel’s presidential suite, and soon afterward, Danchenko took a selfie of himself and the executive at the hotel.Ī few days later, Danchenko flew to London to meet with Steele who then wrote a report that described the hotel’s suite as the setting for the “pee” tape, citing Ritz-Carlton employees as some of the sources for that information. In Durham’s indictment, however, Danchenko comes across more like the type of paid informant often found in the world of private spying - one who tells their employer what they want to hear.Īccording to those charges, he supposedly fed Steele some information that did not come from Kremlin-linked sources, as the dossier claims, but was gossip he picked up from an American public-relations executive with Democratic Party ties who did business in Moscow. According to Crime in Progress, the book written about the dossier by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the founders of Fusion GPS, the former spy never disclosed Danchenko’s name to them but instead described him as one of the most talented collectors of intelligence he had ever worked with. Steele appears to have staked his reputation on the veracity of the reports he received from Danchenko. The charges against Danchenko may also force a reckoning that some journalists who embraced the dossier had hoped to avoid - an examination of their reporting about it and their ties to operatives for hire. Still, it’s hard to imagine a turn of events with more dire consequences than the new indictment for Steele, the dossier, and Fusion GPS, the investigative firm run by two ex- Wall Street Journal reporters that hired the ex-spy on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and promoted his reports to the media. And from the start, he seemed to tip his hand politically by publicly disagreeing with the finding by the Justice Department’s inspector general that the FBI had a legitimate basis to open an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. After all, he was appointed to his post by William Barr, Trump’s attorney general. There is no question that Durham’s inquiry is viewed by some with suspicion. A lawyer who represented Danchenko, a onetime analyst at the Brookings Institute, said at a court hearing that his client planned to enter a plea of not guilty but a judge told him to do so at a future arraignment. On Thursday, John Durham, the special counsel appointed to investigate the FBI’s probe into ties between Trump and Russia, charged operative Igor Danchenko with lying to the FBI about his work on the dossier and allegedly fabricating some information that appeared in it. But this week, it may have been dealt a death blow when the operative used by Steele to gather material for the dossier was indicted. Since BuzzFeed published Steele’s reports in 2017, many of the dossier’s key claims have failed to materialize or have been shown to be false. Steele described his professionalism as an intelligence-gatherer to George Stephanopoulos of ABC News and then doubled down on some of the dossier’s most salacious allegations, asserting, among other things, that the infamous “ pee tape” involving Trump may be still out there, just waiting to be found. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Photos: Getty Images AP/ShutterstockĬhristopher Steele, the former MI6 spy who compiled the notorious dossier during the 2016 campaign alleging ties between Donald Trump and Russia, made a splash a few weeks back when he gave his first interview about it. Left to right, President Trump, Igor Danchenko, and Christopher Steele. ![]()
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